Local librarian spends winter in Japan as ski nanny

By Steve Hubrecht steve@columbiavalleypioneer.com

Nightly soaks in onsen hots springs, a restaurant with a robot cat server, top-notch sushi from convenience stories, a fire festival, a sumo wrestling tournament, a hidden back alley bar that you enter through a door that looks like a cigarette vending machine, a dinner out in a wedding dress and a Mickey Mouse hat, and — oh yeah — endless, fluffy, waist deep-powder snow pretty much every other week. It’s been a winter to remember for Blair McFarlane.

Blair, who is well known to a great many kids up and down the Columbia Valley as a librarian at the Invermere Public Library and as a ski instructor at the Fairmont Hot Springs Resort ski hill, has been spending the season as a ‘ski nanny’ in Japan.

The opportunity came when Windermere residents James and Nadine Robb (who divide their time between the Columbia Valley and Japan, where they run a ski school and backcountry guiding business) decided they could use a hand with their two kids, Summer and Joey, for the winter. They posted on Facebook, looking for a live-in ski nanny. Blair applied for the job (and a threemonth leave from her full-time position at the library) and presto, little more than a month later she was jetting across the Pacific.

Mention the word ‘Japan’ to ski bums the world over, and they immediately think ‘Hokkaido’ — Japan’s northernmost island, land of legendary powder snow. But that’s not where Blair is. Instead she joined the Robbs in Hakuba, a valley and village in the Japanese Alps on Hons- hu, Japan’s main island. It’s not as famous as Hokkaido and perhaps doesn’t get quite as much snow, but make no mistake — the powder is absurdly deep and absurdly abundant in Hakuba too. The mountains are steeper there, and it’s not quite as crowded as the big Hokkaido resorts.

Even though Blair is half a world away, the town of Hakuba is similar in many ways to Invermere, and the Japanese Alps are (aside from being covered with hardwood trees instead of conifers) are quite reminiscent of the Purcells.

“It reminds me a ton of home — ski towns are kind of universal, and draw similar kinds of people to them,” she said when the Pioneer talked to her across the Pacific.